A number of crucial federal government websites experienced total outages on Thursday evening as President Joe Biden delivered his fourth State of the Union address.
It was unknown early Friday morning if the outages were related to the annual speech, which Biden delivered at the U.S. Capitol.
But as the president spoke, websites for numerous government agencies were completely offline for several hours, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
The agencies affected included the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Secret Service.
#BREAKING: Multiple government websites, including DHS, ICE, FEMA and the Secret Service, are down. Cause is currently unknown pic.twitter.com/VTxKagEsQf
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) March 8, 2024
Former President Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, also reported outages:
Trump’s TRUTH Social is also down
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 8, 2024
The outages went viral on the social media platform X as users connected them to Biden’s speech, global tensions and recent outages of other websites:
Seems a lot of this is happening right now.
There’s a local casino under cyberattack as well right now where I live.
https://t.co/8kHmBVDBjS
— id0n0u (@id0n0u) March 8, 2024
Is this real? If so, these sites all went down during the #SOTU2024 address. That seems rather important. https://t.co/ydRtAB2Fpc
— Heidi Social (@HeidiSocial) March 8, 2024
They just keep probing and probing, little by little doing more and more, getting us used to it and no one cares
— Dave (@dave_b52) March 8, 2024
China
— 𝒥αкe (@AuthenticJake11) March 8, 2024
Putin.
— Jeremiah (@N3W311) March 8, 2024
Wait Fed websites and Truth Social down at the same time? Kinda SUS right? https://t.co/S5LfrJjikE
— EllieMae (@mamaEllieMae) March 8, 2024
Some also questioned whether the outages were the result of a cyberattack targeting the federal government:
Is there a spy ballon in the sky again?
— Jason (@shalomninja) March 8, 2024
Are we under cyber attack? https://t.co/KL6goGl89Z
— UnipartyBomber (@magajcs) March 8, 2024
Boy these “definitely not cyber attacks” on us are comforting aren’t they? https://t.co/yBQK2GZSIz
— NiggarificEnergy (@ImMeWhoUdoe) March 8, 2024
As of Friday morning, each of the websites that was experiencing outages was back up and operational. DHS posted late Thursday night that the issue had been “resolved” but offered no additional details.
This issue has been resolved. https://t.co/hxFpL6iBrm
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) March 8, 2024
Thursday evening’s outages followed an hours-long outage of the Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram Tuesday.
Millions of Facebook and Instagram users attempted to use their accounts on Tuesday but were instead greeted by messages that informed them their accounts were essentially locked.
Those outages have since been blamed on internal technical issues and nothing nefarious, Reuters reported.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
